New Seagate Internal Drive Has 3 TB Capacity

Seagate launched a new internal hard-disk drive (HDD) that can hold up to 3 TB of capacity Tuesday, and also announced it is consolidating its HDD offerings under a single streamlined brand based on its existing Barracuda line of drives.

The move comes in response to the explosive demand for increased storage as more and more media of all sorts makes its way onto users’ disk drives, according to Seagate (NASDAQ: STX).

“The new Barracuda family reflects the reality that end-users want a full range of hard drive capacities and as much performance as we can give them to help manage and store massive amounts of digital content,” Scott Horn, vice president of marketing at Seagate, said in a statement.

Additionally, the consolidated HDD family aims to lower OEMs’ and resellers’ overhead costs by cutting down on the number product lines they have to handle.

In the pursuit of faster performance, the new Barracuda drive will feature a 7,200 rpm spin rate, and will have a SATA 6 GBps interface and up to 64 MB of cache. Further, the new drive will be available in sizes from 250 GB to 3 TB, and will initially be sold through Amazon, CDW, Newegg, and TigerDirect, Seagate’s statement said.

In addition, under the product line “simplification,” the Barracuda drives will ship with Seagate’s SmartAlign technology, which is currently a feature of the company’s Barracuda Green drives, and is meant to help customers make the transition from the aging 512-byte sector standard to the new 4096-byte sector size.

The Barracuda Green drives will be discontinued in February because the new drives will be just as energy efficient, the company said.

Meanwhile, Seagate’s fastest desktop drive, the Barracuda XT, will be incorporated into the new Barracuda family as the company’s solid-state hybrid (SSD) desktop drive.

Stuart J. Johnston is a contributing editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @stuartj1000.